It was reported in the media this week that Brian will be making another couple of videos to accompany the release of ‘Another World’, which is very exciting. Talking of videos, one of the directors behind Queen’s later videos, Rudi Dolezal, has just celebrated his birthday. He’s planning to bring out a book this year called ‘My Friend Freddie’, recounting his experiences of working with the band. Having found out about it soon after I’d started writing my book, ‘Bohemia Place’, I’ve had my copy on pre-order for some time. However, I know more than most that you can’t rush these things!
We have to
ask a serious question, though: does anyone appreciate the written word very
much these days? IG may be an interactive experience for some, but I haven’t
found it so – at least not very much - maybe that’s a good thing: a way to avoid
the trolls! So far, I’ve found one other person who’s into writing and may do
some Queen stuff in the future. Let’s be honest, though – IG might just as well
stand for Instant Gratification. It’s easy to like a picture / work of art /
video, without necessarily reading the post (even if it’s in a language we don’t
understand, we can get it translated) - I
know I’ve done that. “That’s great”, you think, and move on. The sheer volume
of visual content can be overwhelming, whereas writing takes time to read. In
fact, reading involves coming off IG for quite a while. Is that even manageable for
some people, when there appears to be some kind of unspoken expectation that you
give your feed a frequent feed? Seems like a lot of pressure to me. And food for
thought. Just saying.
There was another
birthday last weekend, that of Adam Lambert, who’s been in a collaboration with
Queen, performing as their frontman, for around ten years now. I took the opportunity
of posting a ‘portrait in
words’ of him, which is a small excerpt from my book, ‘Bohemia Place’. I wanted
to show that we can regard writing as an art form – maybe we think of
non-fiction as being purely journalistic? But even journalistic writing can be
an artistic endeavour. One of my favourite newspaper journalists is The Guardian’s
Rafael Behr, whose pieces are creations packed with figures of speech. Why, at
school, do we read literature, plays and poetry? Do we not think of those as works
of art?
Also coming
up this coming week: that other Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – seventy years on the
throne! Of course, as usual, the official celebrations will be in the summer. I’ll
miss them this time as I now live outside the UK. In ‘Bohemia Place’, I’ve
written about two significant jubilees in the past: the Silver one in 1977 when I
was at school, and was able to watch it from a special vantage point near St.
Paul’s Cathedral; and the Golden
one in 2002 which was the start of an ‘Amazing Journey’ (the second time
this week that I’ve had cause to quote a song title from The Who) which is also
very much part of the story of my book.
Most of my
posts this week have concerned Chinese
New Year; we’re now in the Year of the Tiger, which is my animal in the
Chinese horoscope (although I appropriately used Queen’s ‘Dragon Attack’ as a
musical accompaniment). Therefore I’m hopeful that it’ll be a great year, not
the least because, hopefully, we can finally settle down to living with this
Covid thing that’s dominated our lives for too long. With this is mind, I’m
planning some more posts of pictures of Wuhan like the one that appeared about a
fortnight ago, showing the day I visited in October 2019. This is very much
on the theme of ‘Another World’, ie the last of the old world we knew before
Covid arrived on the planet, changing our lives forever.
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